Today is the eighth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and today the US is preparing to once again join a military action against an Arab country, Libya.
I wonder how many of Pres. Obama’s advisers have ever even heard the term “Tripartite Aggression”? That is the way Arabs refer to the military action– which also had a veneer of UN respectability– that Britain, France, and Israel launched against Egypt in 1956.
Now, those two long-faded European powers have once again been preparing to take part in a tripartite act of war against an Arab country. And this time, the third party is the United States.
At a time when U.S. allies Bahrain and Yemen have been cracking down very lethally on internal protesters, it is hypocritical in the extreme for the “western” powers to send their military in to punish Col. Qadhdhafi for doing the same in Libya.
What makes the contrast even more poignant is that in Bahrain, at least– and to a large extent also in Yemen– the protesters restrained their actions to acts of nonviolent mass protest, whereas in Libya from very early on the anti-Qadhdhafi movement took on the full aspect of a military insurrection. The Libyan protesters stormed armories and barracks, handed out weapons to all comers, and worked actively to persuade serving military officers to turn their arms against the government forces.
So it is that armed insurrection that the “western” powers are now supporting, while Bahrain’s nonviolent democracy activists are being mown down by western arms in their own streets.
How will it end in Libya? Who knows? The animal spirits of warfare take their own course, as we have seen in Iraq over the past eight years. The invasion of Iraq has notably not turned out well– either for the Iraqi people themselves, whose society was largely destroyed during the fitna (social chaos) that followed, or for the “west”, since the political upshot in Iraq has been an extension of significant Iranian power into the whole country.
55 years ago, the British-French-Israeli aggression against Egypt didn’t turn out well for the “western” powers involved, either. For Britain, 1956 was essentially a last gasp of empire that completely overstretched the London’s capabilities and led almost directly to the collapse of Britain’s ability to extend its power “East of Suez”.
How will this all end in Libya? I suppose there is still time for determined diplomacy by well-meaning non-belligerent powers to get both sides to back down and agree to the ceasefire earlier specified by the Security Council. If so, that ceasefire needs to be monitored. A monitoring body acceptable to both sides needs to be formed. The terms of national reconciliation would need to be negotiated.
The French, however, and the British, and several of those Arab countries that have been so eager to crush the nonviolent democracy in Bahrain, all seem determined to get into the fight against Qadhdhafi, most likely with the aim of bringing him down. (Correction: the Arab powers have been eager to instigate others to get into the fight, not to do it themselves.)
The attempt to act through imposing (among other things) a “no-fly zone” that would, in the view of the authors of this proposal, serve to handicap the Tripoli forces considerably met with a rather severe challenge today, when a first plane was shot down over the rebels’ stronghold in Benghazi– but it turned out to be a rebel-piloted Mirage. If both the rebels and the government forces have planes in the air liable to being shot down, how can the western forces discriminate between them? (And anyway, the no-fly rule is definitely supposed to apply to everyone.)
But let’s say the western forces do take military action. What then? All the commentators in their capitals say they are ready only for a short engagement– nothing like the no-fly zone and tight blockade that the US and UK maintained around Saddam’s Iraq for 12 long years, 1991-2003, causing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths and costing the US a huge amount of money to maintain. So if they are really planning on a “short” engagement this time, it’s likely they are including a decapitation element in their plans. That is, killing Muammar Qadhdhafi in the presumed hope that something better might follow.
Do these people have no memory? Can they not even cast their minds back to the tragedy Iraq suffered after the regime was forcibly toppled there?
In the imagination of some, like Samantha Power and perhaps her boss Barrack Obama, war can be harnessed to worthy humanitarian ends.
Neither Samantha Power nor Barrack Obama has ever, as I have, lived in a war zone. War is quintessentially anti-humanitarian. It visits terrible suffering on children, women, and men– usually for many, many years.
Yes, the humanitarian/political challenge in Libya was searingly acute. (As has been the challenge in Bahrain, and Yemen.) All the powers in the world should be applying themselves to the goal of ratcheting down the violence and finding nonviolent ways to resolve both the underlying political problems and the host of new problems that have been caused by the act of armed insurrection itself.
I pray there is still time.
Author: Helena
Interview with R. Visser at 8th anniversary of invasion of Iraq
- (I first became acquainted with (and came to admire) Reidar Visser’s work when he started posting comments here on JWN during and after Iraq’s December 2005 election… Last fall, he was one of the four authors in Just World Books’s inaugural list. So now, as the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq approaches, I’m cross-posting here the piece about about the interview I conducted with him on Saturday, for the JWB podcast series. ~HC.)
As the eighth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq approaches, Just World Books author Reidar Visser has recorded a new podcast for our series. In it, he updates his assessment of Washington’s post-invasion democratization project in Iraq, coming once again– as he did in his book A Responsible End? The United States and the Iraqi Transition, 2005-2010— to the somber conclusion that the project has been a failure. Visser also roundly refutes the claim made by some Americans that the U.S. democratization project in Iraq was somehow an “inspiration” for the many activists behind the current wave of pro-democracy movements in the Arab world.
This latest podcast was recorded by Just World Books owner Helena Cobban from a phone interview she conducted with him on March 12. It is an informative complement to this other short podcast we have of Visser, which was recorded at his book launch in Washington DC back in December.
Check out our growing library of author podcasts here!
Freeman, El-Haddad, Foust in Charlottesville, Saturday
My publishing company’s three great authors Chas Freeman, Laila El-Haddad, and josh Foust will all be in Charlottesville this Saturday, taking part in a panel discussion on developments in the (Greater) Middle East under the auspices of the Virginia Festival of the Book.
The discussion will be moderated by William Quandt.
Details are here.
I hope that all JWN readers who are nearby will come along– and bring your friends!
Two months of tumult: Pointers for the global tomorrow
The two months since the fall of Tunisia’s Pres. Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali have been marked by tumult throughout the Arab world and now, most recently, by the mega-lethal effects that geological and oceanic activity have had in Japan: effects that remind us again how vulnerable is all human life on this earth, and how unsustainable have become many of the economic and power generation systems the modern world relies on.
Continue reading “Two months of tumult: Pointers for the global tomorrow”
Bayard Rustin understood Palestinians
I just came across this great, short piece of writing, quoting the African-American, gay, Quaker activist Bayard Rustin:
- In 1968, American civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin wrote, “We would be mistaken to think that the only desires of young Negroes today are to have a job, to have a decent house, to be well educated, to have medical care. All these things are very important, but deeper and more profound is the feeling of young Negroes today—through all classes, from the lumpenproletariat to the working poor, the working classes, the middle classes, and the intelligentsia—that the time has come when they should have power, a voice in the solution of problems which affect them.”
This observation is absolutely central if anyone wants to understand the situation and aspiration of Palestinians today. This point has been eloquently made by Laila El-Haddad– both in her recent book Gaza Mom, which my company had the honor of publishing, and in her appearance on Tuesday at this great Capitol Hill briefing (which, as it happens, I had the honor of chairing.)
As Laila says, “What the Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from is not restrictions on their food, it is restrictions on their freedom!”
Interestingly, I got that Bayard Rustin quote not directly from my own reading but from this late-January blog post by the great Egyptian blogger Baheyya. Bayard Rustin to me, via Tahrir Square. Neat, huh?
Open letter to the Pentagon’s Rosa Brooks
Dear Rosa:
I hope you and the family are all well. It’s been a while since we got to know you and your fabulous mother, the principled and gutsy activist Barbara Ehrenreich, when you were living in Virginia. You were still such a big human rights activist at that time.
So anyway… No polite way to phrase this… Rosa, What the heck are you doing in your current role as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Special Coordinator for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy, “running a new Pentagon office dedicated to those issues”… with regard to, primarily:
- 1. The Executive Order that Pres. Obama signed March 7, in which he expressly allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of suspects in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay; and
2. The appalling and deliberate humiliation to which warders in a U.S. Navy brig (naval prison) have been subjecting accused secrets leaker Bradley Manning.
Rosa, what on earth is going on– and what has your role been in all of this??
It is so hard to believe that you, Rosa Brooks, have been turning into John Yoo in this way. Rosa Brooks! With your long record as a consultant for Human Rights Watch, a fellow at he Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, a board member of Amnesty International USA, for goodness sakes, and a member of the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law.
Rosa Brooks, whose newspaper columns at the L.A. Times, 2005-2009, were nearly always deeply animated by your defense of the universal rights of all persons– including the fundamental right to liberty and the right, if accused of a crime, to a fair and open trial… and the rights of all, whether incarcerated or not, to basic standards of human dignity and freedom from torture.
Sadly, the way that this September 2006 column of yours is titled on the website, now looks eerily prescient:”Rosa Brooks: Our Torturer-in-Chief.”
Rosa, please explain so that I and others can understand it: After two years of working in the Pentagon, has the evil of torture now become so routine and (as Hannah Arendt put it) “banal” for you that these latest, extremely abusive steps from the Obama administration now seem “okay” to you?
Do you see your role in the Pentagon as somehow being “to make things less bad than they would otherwise have been”? That is a common reason given by people who get sucked into doing the work of running the apparatuses of repression. (It’s also a “reason” that women who have been abused by their partners commonly give when they decide to stay with them, rather than quit.. Think about that. Are Michele Flournoy and your other bosses at the Pentagon and in the White House actually abusing you and your lengthy record of rights activism when they continue to employ you as their fig-leaf?)
Doing work of the kind you’re doing at the Pentagon is also nicely paid and (in some quarters) prestigious. But I can’t imagine that you have the excuse that your family needs the money you’re getting at the Pentagon. You were doubtless pulling in big bucks before as a law prof at Georgetown; and your husband, Peter Brooks, is not hard up, either. Nor can I believe that you “need” the prestige of working as a relatively lowly DAS at the Pentagon.
So why do you stay there at the Pentagon, providing a quasi-liberal “cover” for an administration that is, let’s face it, behaving in these matters no better than than the George W Bush administration behaved?
Rosa, please consider resigning. Your resignation from this strange office you are holding there could make a real difference. If you do it right, it could make 100 times more of a difference than you could ever hope to make if you simply stay on, tidying up some little portions of the detentions policy around the edges while continuing to act as a liberal fig-leaf there.
If you don’t resign, then that would be the saddest thing.
I wonder what your mom will think of you if stay on as “Rosa Brooks: Our Torturer-in-Chief”. I know what I would think of you.
Stay well, whatever you decide… But please, examine your soul deeply over these two latest, tragic steps.
Warm regards– Helena.
Egyptian activist Hossam on inspiration from Palestine
Key Egyptian democracy activist Hossam (3arabawy) el-Hamalawy had an important piece in the Guardian Unlimited yesterday, underlining the degree to which the Palestinian intifada of 2000– which, lest we forget, started out with many days of unarmed peaceful protest until the death toll rose so high that people’s patience wore out; check the B’tselem figures on this– served as an inspiration for his generation of Egyptian activists.
El-Hamalawy wrote:
- Only after the Palestinian intifada broke out in September 2000 did tens of thousands of Egyptians take to the streets in protest – probably for the first time since 1977. Although those demonstrations were in solidarity with the Palestinians, they soon gained an anti-regime dimension, and police showed up to quell the peaceful protests. The president, however, remained a taboo subject, and I rarely heard anti-Mubarak chants.
I recall the first time I heard protesters en masse chanting against the president in April 2002, during the pro-Palestinian riots around Cairo University. Battling the notorious central security forces, protesters were chanting in Arabic: “Hosni Mubarak is just like [Ariel] Sharon.”
The anger was to explode on an even larger scale with the outbreak of the war on Iraq in March 2003. More than 30,000 Egyptians fought the police in downtown Cairo, briefly taking over Tahrir Square, and burning down Mubarak’s billboard.
The scenes aired by al-Jazeera and other satellite networks of the Palestinian revolt or the US-led onslaught on Iraq inspired activists across Egypt to pull down the wall of fear brick by brick. It was in 2004 that pro-Palestinian and anti-war campaigners launched the Kefaya movement, which took on the president and his family…
So many western commentators have been sounding off to the effect that these current wave of massive democracy protests in the Arab world somehow “prove” that Arabs don’t care about Palestine. This is palpably untrue. Yes, the democracy activists have a lot to do in their own countries, and that is without a doubt their highest priority. But if the pro-Israeli-power crowd thinks that means they don’t care about Palestine… Well, that shows either that they’re hopelessly out of touch or that they’re wilfully lying. Maybe both…
Pro-democracy activism arriving in Saudi Arabia
So this ‘popular movement’ thing is finally making its mark in Saudi Arabia– the only country in the world that is named for one (still-ruling) family.
Today, worldwide oil prices spiked after the markets absorbed news in an Egyptian newspaper yesterday that the Saudi authorities yesterday arrested a Shiite cleric called Tawfic al-Amir, described by the FT’s James Drummond as “a prominent Shia cleric from the east of the Sunni-dominated country.”
The east of the country is where most of its oil reserves are. Bahrain, which has had a resilient, multi-week pro-democracy movement whose participants (both Shiite and Sunni) are challenging the concentration of power in the little country in the hands of a resolutely Sunni, anti-Shia monarch from the Al-Khalifa family, is also, as it happens to the east of Saudi Arabia, and connected to it by a causeway.
The Saudi blogger “Saudi Jeans” had a good roundup post yesterday in which s/he described the latest pro-democracy developments in the country.
Here is how s/he started the blog post:
- I know I said don’t expect what happened in Tunisia and Egypt to happen in Saudi Arabia anytime soon. But I also added that things are happening. In addition to the buzz in social media, the past week has seen the release of several statements and open letters demanding reform…
* * *
I guess I had always assumed that the current pro-democracy (for want of a better term) movement in Yemen was more threatening to the Saudi monarchical elite than that in Bahrain. After all, the rulers of Saudi Arabia (25.4 million) have traditionally– and from an ethical point of view, entirely rightly so– been much more concerned by the gross disparities in economics and living standards between their kingdom and Yemen (population 23.6 million), than they have been concerned about Bahrain (population 776,000) … But I guess this business of “Shiite equality” that is animating the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain touches a very raw nerve in Riyadh…
The Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm yesterday reported that:
- Eyewitnesses have reported seeing an estimated 30 tanks being transported into Bahrain from Saudi Arabia on Monday night at around 6:45pm local time. The tanks were sighted along the King Fahd causeway, which links the small island-nation of Bahrain to Saudi Arabia.
Commuters traveling along the 25-km causeway were held up due to the presence of “15 tank carriers carrying two tanks each heading towards Bahrain.” Civilian eyewitnesses could not, however, confirm whether the tanks belonged to the Saudi military.
* * *
Saudi Arabia is currently mired in one of the longest-running succession struggles the world has ever known. This just about guarantees that the monarchy’s response to the many challenges that “suddenly” now confront it is almost bound to be hesitant, inept, sloppy, and dangerous for everyone concerned.
The current monarch, King Abdullah, is 87 years old, and not in great physical shape. The designated Crown Prince (and thus immediate successor) is his half brother Prince Sultan, age 82. After Abdullah dies, the “senior princes” of the Al-Saud family are all supposed to come together in something called the “Bayaa 9Allegiance) Council” to come to agreement on who the next “King” will be. Most people think this will be Sultan’s full brother, Prince Nayef, who is a “sprightly” 77 years old.
You may see a pattern emerging here. Basically, ever since the death of the country’s patriarch, King Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, in November 1953, the line of succession has been running down through some of the scores of sons sired by that fertile old guy. Throughout his 51-year reign, Abdul-Aziz was using dynastic marriages as a way of winning/cementing the allegiance of disparate tribes to his own royal house. Smart, from one point of view. At the time. But since 1953, that tactic has been a compete deadweight on the ability of the “Saudi” monarchical system to generate and regenerate effective layers of national leaders. Instead, we have had this succession of very competitive brothers and half-brothers, most of them from different mothers, and all hanging onto the perks and privileges of power with an iron grip, whenever they could.
Some of Abdul Aziz’s more competent grandsons are older than many of his sons. I don’t know about the competency of the former King Faisal’s oldest son, Prince Abdullah, but he died in 2007, aged 85. Another of Faisal’s sons, Saud al-Faisal, is a relatively “youthful” 70 years old this year. He’s the world’s longest serving Foreign Minister, and sadly plagued by Parkinson’s and other diseases of old age.
These princes all have access to the most amazing medical and anti-ageing care in the whole world. But that really cannot compensate for the fact of their physical– and in many cases also cognitive– frailty.
Not exactly a sturdy foundation on which to build a pro-American order in the Middle East, I think…. And now, it seems that some of those chickens of increasingly gerontocratic and sclerotic monarchy, easy access to unearned oil wealth, and the virulent anti-Shiite sectarianism of the Saud family’s longtime allies, the Wahhabis, are coming home to roost.
I do feel some sympathy for individual Saudis, including Saudi princes and princesses, who, having been cosseted and pampered from their infancy with the availability of lavishly flowing oil money, the service of indentured and completely rights-less household help and the services of very rights-restricted contracted professional advisers, may have grown up with the idea that they somehow “deserved” all this while Yemeni nationals or those “Godless Shiites” somehow only deserved much less.
But life ain’t like that. All human persons are, it turns out, equal. Maybe it’s time that the Saudi kingdom’s rulers, faced with sudden unexpected challenges from all around, finally figured out how to deal with that?
Pete Seeger joins BDS campaign!
Great news from Max Blumenthal about this. I like his post particularly, because of the sound-track on the video there!
Seeger had been inveigled by something called the “Arava Institute” into taking part on an event that claimed to be only about the environment… But later, he found out about Arava’s close ties to the Jewish National Fund, which has a long (and continuing) record of funding and otherwise supporting ethnic cleansing in historic Palestine.
Libya: What can and should outsiders do?
I’ve been following the news of the carnage in Libya with huge sorrow, and there seems little hope it can be ended soon. Anti-Qadhafi forces seem to have taken control of large portions of the east of the country, while the country’s dangerous and possibly deranged long-time leader has been reinforcing his positions in the capital, Tripoli.
There has been a lot of anguished discussion over what outside powers should “do” about Libya, with a lot of this focusing on imposing a “no-fly zone” over the whole country, presumably with the aim of preventing Qadhafi from rushing in any more reinforcements or resupplies from elsewhere, concentrating his forces within Libya, or using his air force once again to bomb the insurgents from the air. (One good critique of this idea came from Bob Dreyfuss, here.)
Realistically, the only bodies with the capability of enforcing a no-fly zone– in a country that is v. close to Europe’s southern shores– are those associated with NATO. And they are all currently tied up in Afghanistan (where one of the main things NATO’s air assets are doing is, um, bombing insurgents.) So it is unlikely that an internationally authorized no-fly zone as such will be declared or enforced any time soon– though there is a lot that African, European, Arab, and other governments can do to ensure that flights do not leave their countries bearing suspect cargoes or passengers, and bound for Libyan airspace.
There has also been some focus on the evacuations of their nationals that various outside powers have been trying to organize (along with more than a hint that until those evacuations have been completed, the governments concerned will hold off on doing anything to antagonize Qadhafi.)
I have grave doubts about the ethics of such evacuations, as well as the broader efficacy of making them any country’s top priority. If emergency missions are dispatched to save lives, should they not save the lives of all who need to be saved, regardless of citizenship?
Hillary Clinton was quoted in today’s WaPo as saying, “In any situation, our foremost concern has to be for the safety and security of our own citizens.” Why does she still talk like a domestic politician instead of a stateswoman? Also, it simply is not true that in “any” situation the foremost concern of the U.S. government is for the safety and security of its own citizens.
The always thoughtful Issandr Amrani, writing from Egypt, considers the various options open to non-Libyan powers and says,
- Another concept one hears about is a ground invasion by Egypt to restore order. While I kind of like this concept, the Egyptian military has a country to run at the moment and no appetite for adventurism. Let’s be satisfied at least that the Arab League two days ago actually issued a condemnation of what was happening in Libya, a historic first. Arab countries are unfortunately not able to address these kinds of crises, although they should certainly move towards being able to. Even then, I doubt Libyans would be thrilled at having Egyptians in their country, and to Egyptians it might be a very foreign territory considering Libya’s tribal make-up.
We should remember, too, that Libyans are even less likely to be thrilled by any lasting footprint from Italians, Europeans, or other non-Arab powers inside their country. Reports from the “liberated” zone of Benghazi have described the emergence of large Omar Mukhtar posters there, post-liberation.
Issandr continues:
- Another possibility is a decapitation mission against the Libyan leadership, particularly Muammar Qadhafi. I think that this mission with clearly defined and limited aims is the best choice if intervention of any kind is chosen. The only problem is that it might deprive Libyans of the pleasure of doing it themselves (although perhaps those defector pilots could be put to good use). It would obviously rely either [on] an aerial bombing mission (hard to verify success) or a special forces operation (difficult to pull off without good intelligence).
I guess I would just tweak his proposal by changing “decapitation mission” to “incapacitation mission.” I think it’s both wrong and unwise to plan outright to kill anyone, even someone who’s done such heinous things as Muammar Qadhafi. But incapacitating him– and also, crucially, the command-and-control networks through which he exercises his power– is another matter completely.
It is of course possible that he would resist an incapacitation attempt with a bloody use of force, in which context he and others may end up getting killed. I just don’t think that should be the goal.
Another consideration: If Qadhafi himself is the victim of yet another assassination attempt launched by outside powers but his network of repression and brutality still survives, his death could end up simply hardening the resolve of the its members, led perhaps after his demise by his dreadful son Saif. Thus, the goal should be a lasting incapacitation of the network, not just the killing of the man who currently heads it.
Incapacitation could consist of a range of different actions. Qadhafi’s communications networks are an evident part of this. I imagine there are more than a few outside powers who know how these work, including maybe the Chinese and Russians.
Stopping him getting any reinforcements from outside the areas he still controls is another part of it.
Anyway, I am sure that the many defectors from the high levels of the regime– including the interior minister, for goodness’ sake!– must all have good ideas for how to incapacitate what remains of it, along with much of the information that such an effort would require. Let us not imagine for a moment that this needs to be planned or implemented by outsiders! But the Libyan oppositionists themselves need to be given all the support they need.
Issandr ends with this very important note:
- Finally, we should consider the possibility of a prolonged civil war in Libya, with or without the Qadhafis, and no foreign intervention. Someone will be selling weapons to one side or the other. Perhaps some are even considering arming one side, at least so they can defend themselves. I doubt many people want more weapons in Libya, but this is the way things are likely to head if there is no decisive victory by one side or the other. And the best way to avoid that would be to start the political contacts between former Qadhafi regime members, opposition figures and tribal leaders as soon as possible. And that’s something that Egypt and Tunisia, with their familiarity with this little-known country, might be in the best position to offer.
Actually, prolonged civil war or not, the kind of political contacts Issandr is urging are surely a key both to the speedy success of the campaign to oust Qadhafi, and to maximizing the chances that a stable and accountable successor regime can be be established in that long-traumatized country, as soon as possible after his departure. And he’s right that in helping to orchestrate such contacts, Egypt and Tunisia both have a lot to offer. Except that, um, those countries do also have some other urgent challenges of their own right now…
The very best of luck to the peoples of all three of these countries as they deal with the huge challenges they now face.